This novel has the reputation of being under-appreciated. In its defence, Jonathan Franzen writes: “it’s certainly less difficult than other novels common to college syllabuses, and it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you.”

In my case, yes, this novel was really for me.

Franzen continues: “I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it.” And indeed, I bless Francine Prose who put it on her list.

Randall Jarrell’s introduction (which should only be read, like most introductions, afterwards) alludes to Aristotle, who, according to Jarrell “speaks of the pleasure of recognition” which Jarrell applies to the novel, arguing that the reader can get the pleasure of recognizing their own childhood family life. I think that if this were true, Stead’s novel would not be under-appreciated. More realistically, there is a quote online from Hazel Rowley’s biography of the author, which describes the experience of reading Stead as a “chaotic sense of flux that makes reading Stead somehow unlike reading fiction, that makes reading her seem like plunging into the mess of life itself.’ This quality of unpolished rawness is something Stead’s readers either find immensely seductive or immensely irritating.” (Via)

What Randall Jarrell cannot label, writing as he is in 1965, Jonathan Franzen can, in an article published in the summer of 2010 (here, archived). Of Christina Stead’s character, Samuel Pollit, husband and father, Franzen writes:

“To a wild degree, Sam makes his children accessories of and to his narcissism. There isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature, and, in good narcissistic fashion, while Sam imagines himself a prophet of “world peace, world love, world understanding,” he remains happily blind to the squalor and misery of his circumstances.”

What makes it an “ecstatic pleasure” (in Jarrell’s words) to read, is the fact that Christina Stead had the genius to make narcissism palpable. In Franzen’s words: “When Louie tells her father that she’s never told anybody what her home life is like, the reason she gives is that “no one would believe me!” But the grown-up Stead found a way to make readers believe her. The fully mature writer created a faithful mirror of everything her father and Sam Pollit least wanted to see […]”

It is brilliant. And if ever anyone would want to know what it is to be the child of a narcissist, I would point them to this masterpiece.

... these are my favourite quotes. When I look at them I wonder how much they are about the author, Jonathan Franzen, and then how much they are about the reader for having selected them.

“11. He turned to the doorway where she’d appeared. He began a sentence: « I am - » but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as seen as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness were’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word « crepuscular » in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvellously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods - « packing my suitcase, » he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He’d betrayed nothing.

16. …and assumed the burden of seeing La Guardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.

18. …she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

99. Enid, who all her life had been helpless not to observe the goings-on on other people’s plates, had watched Denise take a three-bite portion of salmon, a small helping of salad, and a crust of bread. The size of each was a reproach to the size of each of Enid’s.

100. …with the skimpy laugh with which she tried to hide large feelings.

251. Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly.

263. …what you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

271. And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
As if sustained and too-direct contact with time’s raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.”